Guiding Keywords into Questions

As you know, Curbside.MD specializes in delivering evidence-based answers to real medical questions. However, we also field a significant number of keyword queries, mostly drug and disease names. In some cases, a simple keyword query may be submitted by a user who is new to Curbside.MD and wants to ‘kick the tires’. In other cases, the user may be a returning Curbside.MD user who is looking for the best professional information about a drug or disease. So we asked ourselves, what is the best page of medical evidence that we can show in response to a drug or disease keyword? And if the user is new to Curbside.MD, how can we introduce that person to the habit of submitting their real, complex medical questions?

For drug keywords, we have decided to solve this problem by combining authoritative drug reference information with ‘smart links’ that lead the user into more complex questions. Until recently, reliable drug information has been rather hard to organize effectively, because drug labels (also called ‘package inserts’) have been submitted to the FDA as unstructured PDF documents whose structure is hard for a computer program to interpret. However, the FDA now presents structured drug label information for many drugs through their DailyMed site. Using this resource, Curbside.MD is now able to fetch and organize reliable drug information directly from the FDA and use it to answer both keyword and complex medical questions. In response to a drug keyword, the next release of Curbside.MD will show a compact tabbed view of the different sections of the label, including Indications, Adverse effects, Dosage, etc. In addition, we apply our Document DNA technology to each section of the drug label in order to prompt the user with common follow-up questions. For example, the Indications section describes the diseases that the drug is FDA-approved to treat. We recognize each of the disease names within this section, and present each one as a link to follow up questions. Requip is a drug approved to treat Parkinson’s disease and restless legs syndrome. Clicking on the word ‘restless legs syndrome’ within the Indications section prompts the user with links to questions such as ‘What is the efficacy of Requip for restless legs syndrome?’ Curbside.MD recognizes this question as an example of the Treatment archetype and answers it with focused evidence boxes such as Best Hits from literature, Guidelines, Systematic Reviews, and Clinical Trials.

In this way we are able to provide complete and authoritative drug reference information, and display it in such a way that it is ‘live’, facilitating further exploration and investigation.

Comments

[Joseph Mann]

good post